Condition: BRAND NEW
ISBN: 9781784744755
Format: Paper over boards
Year: 2025
Publisher: RANDOM HOUSE UK


Description:
A lyrical meditation on how Black Americans have envisioned utopia - and sought to transform their lives.



'Renewed my faith in the human power to resist, imagine and make new, better worlds.' Susanna Crossman, author of Home Is Where We Start




'Compelling' TLS



How do the disillusioned, the forgotten, and the persecuted not merely hold on to life but expand its possibilities and preserve its beauty? What, in other words, does utopia look like in black?




These questions animate Aaron Robertson's exploration of Black Americans' efforts to remake the conditions of their lives. Writing in the tradition of Saidiya Hartman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robertson makes his way from his ancestral hometown of Promise Land, Tennessee, to Detroit - the city where he was born, and where one of the country's most remarkable Black utopian experiments got its start. Founded by the brilliant preacher Albert Cleage Jr., the Shrine of the Black Madonna combined Afrocentric Christian practice with radical social projects. Central to this endeavour was the Shrine's chancel mural of a Black Virgin and child, the icon of a nationwide liberation movement that would come to be known as Black Christian Nationalism.




Alongside the Shrine's story, Robertson reflects on a diverse array of Black utopian visions, from the Reconstruction era through the countercultural fervour of the 1960s and 1970s and into the present day. By doing so, Robertson showcases the enduring quest of collectives and individuals for a world beyond the constraints of systemic racism.



The Black Utopians is